Full-time entertainers

Social networks turned me into a full-time entertainer and entertained person. They managed to detach me from the real world, keeping me busy thinking about how to entertain people or starving to stay up to date because boredom became uncomfortable. This led to peaks of anxiety that I had never experienced before, and a lack of joy for things that used to be enjoyable because I started doing them just to talk about them. I tried to escape this many times, but I always fall back, like addicts experience with drugs. I became addicted to those dynamics.

The thing is that I’m aware that this is unhealthy. I don’t like it. But there’s this idea that I’ve built a brand, either mine or Tuist‘s, that would fade if I’m not active where everyone is. It’s a bit nonsensical, because we have no control on those platforms over how we are presented. Perhaps a brand might even deteriorate there because you might end up morphing it into a meme-posting machinery, but still, that thought is recurrent, and I believe it is the trigger that brings me back, along with the idea that people are talking about the new thing. So what? 5 new vibe coding tools, an add-AI-to-x tools, and a couple of new JS frameworks… Again, so what? I don’t want to sound cynical. I like tech, but a big part of the industry is hype cycles, because the tech industry is technology embedded in capitalism, and therefore it needs to reinvent itself. Today you are generating Ghibli Studio images, and tomorrow you’ll be generating your TikTok dances, the day after you’ll be an expert in the process of electing the new Pope, and in two weeks you’ll show your expertise in power outages in Spain.

I’m happy we decided this is not the game we want to play with Tuist. It’s stressful, tiring, and takes the focus away from the joy of the craft, which is what we love doing. It feels uncomfortable at times. Should we be doing like the others? But at the end of the day, we don’t control those algorithms. They are controlling us and making us part of the exploiting machinery, ensuring there’s stuff we can feed people with. We are placing a focus on our blog. Writing from the passion for what we love, and going deep into those topics. Embracing standards such that people can pull the content when and how they feel. If we are present on any social platform, we try to be on the ones that we think haven’t “enshittified” yet.

I’m trying again. I want to be present. I want to remain mentally healthy. I want to shift the focus from the telling to the doing. I don’t want to feel like a zombie hamster starving for “new” stuff, or feeling I have to contribute to keep other hamsters fed too.